Taxes, Tariffs, Truth, Transparency - with Christian Briggs – [Ep. 246]

Linda J Hansen:  Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Breakroom Economics® Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck® and the creator of the Breakroom Economics® Online course.

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We can see a huge shift in our nation just since Inauguration Day. These first few weeks of Donald Trump's presidency have been, in my opinion, a much needed bull in a china shop. I'm so thankful for his courage and boldness and strategic execution of things that have been needed for a long, long time. So today we'll be talking about taxes, tariffs, and transparency.

My guest is economist Christian Briggs, Christian is the CEO of Hard Asset Management Group, Incorporated. He is an independent economic analyst, a political pundit, and an expert in all these things that have been really on the minds of Americans.

We were talking before we recorded that tariffs are trending on X right now and people are concerned about tariffs with how we would fund the government with no taxes, no income tax. This is a big issue and it's creating quite a shift in how we fund our economy.

So Christian, thank you so much for joining with me today. I appreciate the time you've taken to bring your expertise to this conversation, and welcome.

Christian Briggs: Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, it's great, and just a little behind the scenes for the listeners. We found out when we met on Zoom that we grew up in the same area. So who knew? 

Christian Briggs:  We did.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, it's a small world. So kudos to the Uizeta and Minnetonka, Minnesota area. So yeah, so it's great. Beautiful area. So hello, Minnesota friends.

But anyway, more important than that is what's happening in our economy today. If you could give one reassuring note to all employers, employees, people in the U.S. who are all concerned about what's happening economically right now in the U.S. with Trump's policies, what's one thing you would say? 

Christian Briggs: It's an old saying, no pain, no gain. We're going to have a little pain, but we're going to gain a lot more in the long run than anybody would have imagined with these tariffs. Trump knows what he's doing.

He's built skyscrapers 50 stories tall. He knows you can't build them in a day, a week, a month or a quarter, but he will get it done, and once the product is done, everyone's going to be really pleased with the end game.

Linda J. Hansen: I love that. I've told people, too, it's like a cancerous tumor. If you have cancer or some serious illness, you have to diagnose the problem, which is wonderful.

We've seen the symptoms of the problem, the symptoms of the illness, for sure, for many decades, and now we're starting to diagnose. I mean, I thank God for DOGE and what they're able to uncover.

But then how do we heal the problem? This is one aspect of it. So when you think of tariffs and people who are afraid about U.S. manufacturing or what it'll do in the short term, what would you say to those manufacturers? 

I mean, just this week, he put a tariff on aluminum and steel to bring the aluminum and steel production back to the U.S., which would be so exciting. But there may be some hiccups along the way. How can you reassure our American manufacturers? 

Christian Briggs: Well, first, let's just talk about China. China has been a predatory seller for 30 years. They've been taking a product, a commodity. Let's take steel, for example, aluminum obviously came on the horizon about 10, 15, almost 20 years ago. But steel has been around for 30, 40 years, where China has been undercutting our manufacturing industry in a predatory selling manner.

In other words, they're selling below cost. When you sell below cost into another sovereign nation like the United States, you're willfully trying to hurt the domestic manufacturing economy. So it wasn't like they were creating a low cost product.

They were willfully subsidizing manufacturing of steel, now aluminum, in China by selling it to Canada at subpar prices, knowing that you could not theoretically make those products here in the United States. It would not be competitive. We cannot make a widget for $2 when China is selling it to Canada for $0.50. And then Canada puts on their tax or whatever their fee is, and then sells it back into the U.S. so China can then get around some of the trade wars, the conditions of a trade war.

Certainly, they're doing things that are unscrupulous, and they know this. So rather than try to come direct, because the U.S. would have easily identified that, they sold it to Canada. Canada would then package it up under a Canadian steel product, repackaging, looks pretty, put a bow on it. Guess what? It still came in the U.S. at subpar pricing. 

So what Trump's doing is trying to level the playing field. In fact, I think he was going to go further than that. He's going to make America great, better than it's ever been before. But in order to do that, what grows the middle class faster? What is the number one thing that the middle class thrives at? 

Let's go back to the 40s and World War II. What happened? Manufacturing. The war effort. What happened after that? The auto industry boomed in America. Detroit was one of the most robust, incredibly dynamic cities. It was almost like a mini version of Chicago and New York in the 50s and 60s. So what happened then was we had a manufacturer that had what? High-paying jobs, long-paying jobs. In other words, you had job security.

So what Trump has to do, there are three types of industries in America. I call it the widget industry, which is the gumball products. We can make those in China all day long. Those are the $0.10, $0.20, $0.50 items. Then there's that middle part. We're going to make parts for housing. Then there's the heavy industry. Now, heavy industry, heavy manufacturing is the name of the game. That's aerospace, airplane manufacturing, that's auto, steel, and aluminum. What are the two biggest components in multi-construction? Being family homes, single family, multi-family, commercial buildings, jets, cars. Anything you can think of, is steel and aluminum. So that's heavy industry. That is the basis of high-paying, long-term, middle-class jobs. Now, here's something very interesting about that.

When you manufacture in heavy industry a dollar worth of product, it has a minimum reverberation into the economy in this country of at least $6 to $12. Now, people are like, how can that be? Well, think about it. If you're making $150,000, take Tennessee here, we have the old Saturn plant. General Motors had their car brand, Saturn. They've turned that into an electric vehicle and hybrid and battery manufacturing. Super $6 billion facility. It's unbelievably gorgeous, not far, just south of Nashville. That's going to employ thousands and thousands of high-paying jobs.

Between the salary, the benefits, the stock options, the paid time off, these people are going to make six figures. You take six figures into the economy of Columbia and Spring Hill, Tennessee, you can buy whatever you want. And when that money gets spent, you think the dry cleaners are going to do good? The grocery stores, the gas stations, the daycare, the girl gymnastics where they want to do ballerina and dancing. Every single person benefits from a high-paying manufacturing job. 

See, what people don't realize is we, for too long, have been soft. Soft on trade. Well, guess what? No more soft. If you want soft, buy yourself a pillow. If you want hardcore businessman, put Trump in the Oval Office. And I promise you, you're going to get somebody that can identify who's doing us wrong, how we're going to turn that around, and how we're going to bring the middle class back up to where it was, and then some in the 50s. See, Trump knows how to negotiate. Why? You can't build anything in New York without a union giving you the thumbs up.

It goes from the steel guys, the aluminum guys, the glass, the plumbers, electricians, the concrete. Every single person has to be negotiated with. This is Trump's specialty. He's a negotiator. He creates compromising opportunities between both parties, so they both feel they got a good deal. 

The trade wars could escalate. I'm not going to kid. They will bring some inflationary pressures on some things, and the house, the grocery store, the pump, it's going to happen. But if we can bring back the jobs, we bring back middle class, we bring back middle class, we bring back what? Wage growth.

More so than what the inflationary pressures are. In his first term, people were very negative initially on those tariffs. But let's talk about what the net effect was. Within three years of taking the Oval Office, he brought back 462,000 high paying jobs. If it wasn't for COVID, he was on track to do 600,000. Obama lost us 3 million jobs in eight years.

It took eight years to destroy manufacturing under his weak, weak leadership. Trump comes in, fixes it and reverses it by almost a half a million. Who's the rock star now? Right? It's like I said before, who's the leader among men who can help bring, what I can tell you this right now, is America's manufacturing is going to be brought back. And that new Secretary of the Treasury, he's a rock star. This guy knows business. He's a billionaire.

And the Democrats recently have called Elon Musk, AOC called him dumb and stupid. He's the dude's richest man. I mean, he's the dude, right? Remember the movie, The Big Lebowski? The dude, that's the dude.

So there is no way Trump's going to have people that are less smart. In fact, Trump's so smart, he puts smarter people in the room with him. That's the key. Intelligence attracts intelligence. But when you put smarter people in the room with you, you become smarter. That's how it works.

There's an old biblical principle. I don't know if you ever heard this, but I'll give it to you. It's economics. One day the farmer was out in his field. He noticed the other farmer was having a really good, bountiful, huge harvest. And he's like, I wonder what happened.

And so he talks to the farmer. The farmer goes, yeah, I bought an ox. Helped my plow. I was able to plow twice as much than by myself. Farmer says, well, I'm going to go to town and get me an ox. But instead of one ox, he bought two oxen.

The Bible says with one ox, we can pull 2,000 pounds. But with two oxen, we can pull 5,000. See, there's power in unity, especially when you're led by God.

Trump is a man of faith who puts people of faith around him. So they not only synergize on their own intelligence, but they lean on wisdom and understanding that they get from God. So when you look at what he's doing and how fast, I call it the warp speed economy here now, he's already making a difference.

When you've got the bad guys scrambling, like the Democrats, the people that were already getting those handouts illegally. And Elon Musk has really kind of gone from that center left to center far right. God bless him for doing that. He realizes religion is a good thing. Faith is good. And you can rely on other things and people. And look what they've done. Look what they've done already. They've shaken it up. They're now able to put together what I think is going to be one of the largest manufacturing reboots in history. And it's already starting to happen. 

Linda J. Hansen: It's so exciting. It really is. And people say, how will we fund the government if we don't have income taxes? But Andrew Jackson did that. And we had a great time of economic rebirth, in a sense. I just tell people, wouldn't you love to not pay this much money to the government out of your income taxes all the time? I mean, you live in Tennessee, which is a much better state regarding taxes than where I live. The difference is just incredible when you live in a low-tax state versus a high-tax state.

So when we can take that concept of releasing that burden on the American people, and make it unleash their ability to grow and prosper and flourish, I mean, that's just going to be incredible for our economy. I love how he said he's going to do the external revenue service, not just the internal revenue service. I love this thinking, outside the box. It's great. That's an old phrase that people get tired of. But how innovative. I love how strategic he is and how this is all coming to light.

People have been praying for years. I know I've been praying for decades for a lot of this to come to light—what's happening in our government and the corruption and things. DOGE has brought a lot of it to light. We can see how these policies are already turning things around. In Argentina, we can see what they've done to turn their economy around quickly. So I tell people, yes, it may be painful at first, but this will be an amazing rebirth of America's economy.

Christian Briggs: Oh, for sure. Yeah, what they've done in Argentina was nothing more than simple math. The old saying is people lie, math doesn't. They were bloated government, too much corruption, too many people were getting paid off the taxpayers' back. That money had to go back to inner services, whether that was health care, whether that was infrastructure, whether that was running the government in a more efficient manner with less government. You don't need it.

Look at Twitter. When Musk took over Twitter, he fired 80% of the people. Now it's become twice as profitable, twice as efficient with literally 80% less people. So it's not about the number of people that you can put into a place. It's about the efficiency of each individual's opportunity to create. 

I've always said this before, you are responsible for this. You have to do this. If you do this, it's a domino effect.

It's a great chain reaction that companies often miss. They look at upper, middle and lower management as being layered to be more successful. The less people has been proven to be more successful. When Instagram was first put out before Facebook bought Instagram, it only had eight people running the whole company. It was bought for $600 million. When it became integrated into Facebook, what we looked at is it became a little bit of a behemoth, and they actually pared it down. Facebook laid off some people. They realized that when you have too many people, it actually creates more indecisions. You need people that know how to direct and delegate. Direct a task, delegate it to the most efficient, qualified person.

Trump is cutting back what? The employee numbers in the federal government. You don't need... I read a deal not too long ago, a little article that said, in some cases in the various departments of the federal government—well, there's 450 departments. I didn't even know there were more than 50. There's 450.

There were six people layered in several agencies that did the exact same thing. It's like six people changing a light bulb simultaneously, or taking out the one single trash can. Six people. It's a trash can. It's by your desk. You only need one person to do it, but they would have six people.

The reason they did that in the Biden administration—and it later turns out that about 70% of the full-time jobs were fake. They were all government hires to increase unemployment in some areas and decrease unemployment in some. They increased the workforce and they called it full-time.

But what they didn't realize is that we were increasing unemployment for residents, citizens, and giving illegals more full-time. We got the part-time. So they were playing with the map. They were lying. They were cooking the books, as is in the last couple of days. More information with USAID is coming out.

What's interesting is, do we have corruption in government? Probably. I'll give you an example. And this is the reason why tariffs are so important. We're going to go back to the subject matter here: they're barring the President of the United States from reviewing the books at the Treasury Department. Judges have put a hold on that, a block.

The tariffs are needed because we know we have a $37 trillion debt coming up. We know we have escalating interest rates. The tariffs are how we're going to level the playing field. If we grow the middle class, that's a tax base. You put 4, 5, 6 million people to work at $100,000 a year—do the math. That's 20% tax rate. 25% of that money goes to the government.

How many billions a day is that? We don't have to raise taxes. We can actually do what you mentioned earlier. Andrew Jackson had a $60 million national debt. He didn't have any income tax to fall back on. So what do you do? You raise tariffs on imported goods. Within four years, guess what happened? Zero debt. Zero! So it can be done. It will be done. But here's the reality.

It can't be done in a week. It probably won't be done in a month. It will take 12 months to 18 to see the value of the effort of what's being done right now.

So if people want a strong country, a respected country, higher wages in their pocket, you want to be able to afford an Ivy League college for your student or your child to go to college, no problem. It takes money to do that. If the middle class are thriving, everybody thrives.

Manufacturing is the key to a thriving country. I don't care where it's at. It could be in Argentina. It could be in Colombia. If you continue to push down the middle class through overregulatory environment, substandard efficient government—I call it substandard. If it's not working, it's substandard, right? It's what it is.

Look what happened in Argentina. They've reversed all of that nonsense. Trump not only is going to reverse it, he's going to put into positions people that are so powerful of intelligence and that one, put America first. Two, that are people that will not succumb to the corruption like many have in the years past and current. And three, are going to also thrive when America does great because they're Americans. They've got investments. We can all win by doing the right thing.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly. And I know our time is coming to a close. What is one thing you would say to employers so that they could educate their employees about this issue? Like what's one thing you think that would be helpful for employers to say to employees so employees don't panic about all that's happening?

Christian Briggs: The tariffs worked in the first term. The tariffs have worked in Andrew Jackson's term. They always work. But it takes time to see the results.

Anybody who goes to the gym thinks that, hey, I'm going to give it a hard week. January 1st comes around, New Year's resolutions. They last a week or two. They're not seeing the results. That's because it doesn't happen like that.

If you understand how it works, then the expectations are exactly what they should be. They're expected at a fairly systematic timeline. If you know it takes 30 days, 60 days, or 90 for anything, then the expectations are pretty much understood and there's no disappointments.

I'm going to tell you right now for the employers out there, it takes 12 months for anything government does to see or feel some effect. It takes 18 months for goodwill to be felt across the nation. I think Trump's going at warp speed to try to shorten those timelines as best he can.

But if we say 12 to 18 months, and it happens in nine months, over-delivered. Let's do it. And that's what he's going to do.

So give Trump the time he needs. We just spent four years begging for this guy to come back in the Oval Office. Give him 12 months. Give him 18 months. But give him the time because it will work. It's always worked in the past. It will work in the future. 

Linda J. Hansen: It will work in the future again. And for all of you listening, we need to be the active citizens that also then put pressure on our elected officials so that they follow this up with laws that will support this type of economic growth and development.

So Christian, your time is really short here. So before you leave, I'd like you to just share your contact information if people want to follow you or get in touch with you. How should they do so?

Christian Briggs: Our website is BMCHAM.com or you can follow me on X at BMC_HAM. And you're more than welcome.

My podcast show is the Hard Asset Money Show on Apple. So please feel free to listen and comment and whatever. But I love your show. It's great. Faith-based shows. They resonate. People can really understand that we are a faith-based country and anything less than that is not right. Based on God's principles, Trump follows those principles. It's going to be a good four years.

Just give them a couple months to start to talk and give them about a year. You will see the results. 

Christian Briggs: We will. And speaking of faith, we need to keep our president, our vice president and our elected officials all in prayer because the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. So as scripture says, prayer. So may God bless America and heal America.

And thank you very much. I look forward to having you back again. Thank you.

Christian Briggs: Oh, thank you so much. 

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Please contact us today at prosperity101.com to let us know how we can serve you. Thank you.